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The first test John Urschel faces every Saturday comes courtesy of Miles Dieffenbach's cell phone.

It's on there that the sophomore left guard will search for a brain teaser before every game that he could use to challenge the junior who plays at the right guard position.

The brain teasers are, as Dieffenbach described, "intense," and there is only one goal for Urschel once his teammate reads it off of his tiny cell phone screen: Be correct.

"He didn't get them right against Temple," Dieffenbach chuckled.

"He just told me he was going to give me something to warm me up before the games," Urschel added.

In a nutshell, that's John Urschel, a kid to whom limbering up the mind is as much a warm-up as stretches and pregame drills.

On the field, Urschel has developed into a standout in his first full season as a starter, grading out at a 90 percent for his performance in last week's 35-7 win over Illinois, in which the Nittany Lions rushed for 173 yards on 52 bruising carries. But that may be as close to a B as he'll ever get.

Off the field, the Penn State offensive line boasts four starters who have earned a 3.4 grade point average or better in the classroom. But even among them, Urschel is a standout student. Even though he didn't begin taking classes at Penn State until the fall of 2009, he already is carrying around his degree in mathematics, which he earned in less than three years.

When he graduated, he did so with a perfect 4.0 grade point average. Now, he is enrolled in a master's degree program in statistics, which he hopes to complete by 2014.

"What a fantastic kid," head coach Bill O'Brien raved. "That's why you want a job like this: Because you have a chance to coach and be around guys like that.

"Here is a guy that's a 4.0 math major at Penn State. (On the field) he's just a tough guy, has great flexibility, is very smart, very instinctive.Really, he's just what Penn State is all about, John Urschel."

Don't get him wrong, though. Urschel takes football seriously - perhaps just as seriously as he as always taken his academic pursuits.

He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and he attended high school after his family moved to the Buffalo, N.Y. area. As a youngster, he played lacrosse and a few other sports in upstate New York, but he didn't begin his football career until he enrolled at Canisius High School.

"I started playing for fun. I had never played before," Urschel said. "But my father played college football, and I thought it would be a good way to make friends in ninth grade. I went to a Jesuit high school, and none of us knew each other in junior high. I just ended up really enjoying it. I think it has been really been good for me."

Despite decent quickness and good size, at 6-foot-3 and 263 pounds, for a guard, Urschel never became more than a decent college prospect. Penn State was one of the three scholarship offers he received - the others came from Boston College and the other from hometown Buffalo - and even that offer came late in the recruiting process, and only when the Nittany Lions coaching staff realized there would be enough room to make a pitch to him.

But it hardly mattered to the Urschels. John's mother, Venita, instilled a thirst for knowledge and a value for education in her son from an early age, and that always dwarfed anything accomplished on an athletic field.

"My mother made sure academics came first," Urschel said, "and I don't think it was even close in my household growing up."

She pushed her son toward engineering, his original major when he arrived at Penn State. But Urschel's heart pushed him toward math. By the time his first semester ended, he completed all the math requirements needed to pursue an engineering degree. But his love for the subject led him to change majors.

Now though, his love of graph partitioning and celestial mechanics is at least rivaled by his love for football. When it comes to planning a post-college future, Urschel is still hoping life will take him somewhere that his degrees won't.

"I've been blessed to play football here," he said. "And hopefully, I'll be playing beyond here."

Contact the writer: dcollins@timesshamrock.com

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